RICE Prioritization Template

About the RICE template

The RICE template helps you evaluate and prioritize new ideas. Product teams often use it to gain perspective before starting their product roadmap.

Your typical product roadmap contains a ton of moving parts — lots of exciting ideas that your team might be eager to implement ASAP. Using the RICE template, you make sure that you stay on track throughout the entire process. You’ll be able to prioritize the most important tasks and focus on creating a product roadmap that’ll bring you the most success.

What is a RICE framework?

When you think about your ultimate goal, delighting your customers, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed with all these new ideas. Teams might be tempted to dive right into the cleverest ones first without considering the potential lift. When there’s so much to consider, how do you determine priorities?

This is where the RICE prioritization framework can help.

The RICE acronym stands for reach, impact, confidence, and effort — four factors to help you evaluate and prioritize ideas. It’s a prioritization process that allows your team to consider each project and assess its feasibility. When used correctly, it can have a massive impact on the direction and growth of your business.

When to use RICE

RICE is an adaptable scoring model. It forces you to think through how and why a project idea will or will not have an impact. It removes some of the emotion from the decision-making process, making it easier for teams to come to a consensus.

Here are some common scenarios where using the RICE framework template can be helpful for teams:

• You’re struggling to narrow down your ideas. Working in a team is great, but it often means that you have various ideas and suggestions to contend with. To help you impartially decide between several compelling ideas, use the RICE method.

• You need to assign priorities in a product roadmap. A product roadmap outlines the direction and vision for your project line over time. Chances are, your product roadmap will feature a variety of ideas and suggestions. To narrow down your ideas and help your business grow as quickly as possible, use the RICE framework. Putting your ideas in the framework will show you what to prioritize.

• Your team doesn’t agree. When your team is struggling to align or agree on new ideas, the RICE method is a simple way to get everyone together for a productive discussion.

• You’re about to start a new project or launch a new product. Many teams find it useful to employ RICE at the beginning of each major project or when planning a new product launch. It helps them narrow down their ideas and focus on the most important aspects of the new project or product launch.

How do you use the RICE template?

With Miro, making a RICE framework is easy. Our whiteboard tool is the perfect canvas to create and share your RICE model with the rest of your team and any key stakeholders that might want to take a look.

Get started by selecting this RICE template, then take the following steps:

1. Evaluate the reach of a project. How many people will the project affect? Will your customer see a direct impact? Typically, teams measure reach as the number of people impacted or the number of events occurring in a given period of time.

For some teams, this means customers per quarter. For others, page views per month. It’s important to quantify this value with real data, such as product metrics. Remember, the outcome of this exercise is a numerical value that will help you prioritize tasks.

2. Think about the impact of the project. If reach is how many people will be affected by this project, impact measures the effect itself. Let’s say you’re launching a new paid feature in your app. reach is the number of people affected by this launch, while impact is how likely the launch is to convert them to paying customers.

Unlike reach, impact can be difficult to quantify. Many teams evaluate impact scores using a scale from 1 to 3. 1 is low impact, 2 is medium, and 3 is high.

3. Define your confidence score. How confident are you that this project will have the desired impact? It might be the greatest idea you’ve ever had, but if you don’t have the data to corroborate its success, it might not make sense to work on it right now.

Your confidence score is evaluated as a percentage. 100% is total confidence, 80% signifies optimism but not total certainty, and 50% is low confidence. Anything under 50% is very low.

4. Think about effort. What’s the total time it will take to complete this project? To evaluate effort, don’t just think about the project itself, but also think about the teams who will contribute. It might take four days to complete the project as a whole, which breaks down into ten hours for engineering, 12 hours for marketing, and so on.

Your effort score is measured in person-months or the work that one team member can execute in a month.

5. Calculate your score. To get a RICE score for a particular task, perform the following simple calculation:

Reach x Impact x Confidence / Effort

A higher score indicates that you’ll get more value for your time. In other words, you’ll spend less time working on it but yield the best results.

Although a lower score suggests less value, it doesn’t mean it’s not important. Park it for now and return to it when the time is right. For now, you need to focus on your top priorities, which will be the tasks with the higher scores.

6. Repeat the process for each task. Compile a list of tasks and scores to assess your priorities. By the end of this process, you’ll have a clear idea of what to do going forward.